Friday, August 21 2015

If you're running Debian 8.1 "Jessie" and are a Hulu
subscriber, you've probably just received a nasty surprise — the
new Hulu DRM will hit you with an error that starts with
"One time loading experience to make the rest of your life
better" and then an error code. No movie. No joy. If
that's what a better life looks like, I'll be quite content to stick to
the not-better life I've already got, thank you very much.

I was just about to tell Hulu to take a flying... and go back to
Netflix, but I haven't yet found the secret sauce that will enable HTML5
video to make sound on my system. I decided to defuckerize Hulu instead,
and though it's a purely evil hack it seems so far to be working just
fine. Here's what I did on my AMD64 workstation:

DISCLAIMER: Following the instructions that follow
might cause all manner of horrible things to happen to your computer.
Proceed at your own risk.

First, make sure that your system backups are current, safe, and within
easy reach just in case things go very badly. Then:

You may need some development libraries in order to successfully make
and install hal-info — being a developer I've got scads
of -dev stuff already and didn't run into any problems. If you run into
a glitch, you'll probably have to STFW for the solution. Please don't
ask me for help unless you've got a credit card and will be happy to pay
my exorbitant hourly rate.

First things first: Extract the hal-info archive, configure, make, and
install it. It'll complain that you don't have a great enough version of
HAL installed, but you can safely ignore that warning because at the
moment you don't have any HAL at all installed.

That'll keep APT from crying about the missing dependency on hal-info
when you install the downloaded hal.

Then, as root, and in the directory into which you've stored all of
those heinous Ubuntu .deb files:

dpkg -i libhal1_0.5.14-8ubuntu2ppa5_amd64.deb

dpkg -i libhal-dev_0.5.14-8ubuntu2ppa5_amd64.deb

dpkg -i libhal-storage1_0.5.14-8ubuntu2ppa5_amd64.deb

dpkg -i libhal-storage-dev_0.5.14-8ubuntu2ppa5_amd64.deb

dpkg -i hal_0.5.14-8ubuntu2ppa5_amd64.deb

Assuming nothing caught fire, exploded, or leaked out of your computer,
you can reinit or reboot your machine and try viewing a Hulu video. It
might work. It did for me.

For The Record: I always advise very strongly against installing Ubuntu
packages on Debian systems, but in this case I ignored my own advice and
got lucky. There's no way I'd install a full, real HAL from source
because it would very likely hose up a modern Debian system — HAL
has always sucked almost as badly as Flash, which I suppose is why Adobe
chose to make DRM in Flash depend upon HAL in the first place.

If you give this a shot, please leave a comment below with a few
pertinent details about your system and whether or not it worked.